Lee Miller and Man Ray: crazy in love

She was the unrivalled beauty, he the fearsome artist who made even Picasso
seem reserved. They loved each other with a fury that was to tear them
apart. Yet, as a new exhibition reveals, they would eventually, against all
odds, find their happy ending

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Man Ray and Lee Miller at a shooting gallery in Paris, c1930 by unknown photographer

When Lee Miller left New York to sail to Paris aboard the Comte de Grasse, just two weeks after her 22nd birthday in 1929, her two lovers flipped a coin to see which of them would see her off. As the winner watched her sail down the Hudson into the morning sun, he spotted his rival following in a biplane, swooping close enough to the sun deck to let loose a shower of roses in her honour.

That a young woman could inspire such ardour is clue enough to the story that followed. Miller was leaving New York at the height of her fame as a model. A regular on the cover of Vogue, she was, by common consent, one of the most striking women of the age. A favourite subject of the great photographers Edward Steichen and Arnold Genthe, her pale blonde hair was cut so short that she looked, in Cecil Beaton’s words, “like a sun-kissed goat boy from the Appian Way”.

But Miller’s vim and beauty stirred up trouble for herself and those who loved her. She was constantly under siege from men who wanted to assert ownership over her, and she drove artists in their legions to pinnacles of creativity. Cocteau cast her in his film The Blood of a Poet, Picasso outlined her perfect form in no less than six portraits.

None, however, came close to the passion she inspired in the artist and photographer Man Ray. For three intense years they worked side by side in his studio, first as artist and apprentice, then as lovers and artistic equals, finally as bitter adversaries. By the time they parted in 1932, Ray had driven himself to the brink of a madness from which he would take decades to recover.

Both Ray and Miller are well-known figures in modern art, yet a show or a book examining their partnership has been missing until now, as the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts opens Man Ray Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism. A catalogue introduced by Phillip Prodger, the museum’s curator of photography, and Antony Penrose, Miller’s son by the man she eventually married, Roland Penrose, is also published this week.

The couple first met on the upper floor of a bar called the Bateau Ivre on the Boulevard Raspail, not far from Ray’s studio in Montparnasse. “It was intentional on my part, I was chasing him,” recalled Miller, in an interview she gave to the American Home Journal, in 1975.

Laid out in the style of a modern pleasure yacht, complete with a spiral stairway in nickel that led from the ground floor to the deck above, Lee sat and waited. “Suddenly Man Ray kind of rose up through the floor at the top of the circular staircase. He looked like a bull with an extraordinary torso and very dark eyebrows and dark hair. I said, ‘My name is Lee Miller, and I’m your new student.’ Man said, ‘I don’t have students.’ He was leaving for Biarritz the next day, and I said, ‘So am I.’ I never looked back!”

Going to Biarritz was the start of an adventure. Both had come from New York originally and both wished to reinvent themselves. He took snapshots of her on the road, leaning on his stylish open-top Voisin, wearing a beret that matched his own. When they returned to Paris, she cabled her father to say she had taken rooms in the Boulevard Montparnasse, and was staying to study photography.

Montparnasse “was the centre of everything then” she recalled. “There were some terrific restaurants where you’d find James Joyce, Hemingway and all those people with their coteries around them. The interplay of ideas refreshed and stimulated everyone’s work.” Man Ray’s studio was in the most desirable area. Through an ochre-tiled doorway, a frieze of Art Nouveau muses ushered the visitor inside, where a plaque with his name identified his ground-floor duplex. To begin with, Lee worked as his assistant and receptionist, captivating visitors with her exceptional beauty. Madge Garland of British Vogue described how they were “greeted by a vision so lovely they forgot why they had come”.

To Lee he gave a small folding Kodak camera, and set about teaching her everything he knew. Before long, she abandoned her rooms nearby, and moved in. Together Miller and Ray became part of a vibrant and exclusive social set, and vacationed in the south of France with Picasso and Surrealist photographer Dora Maar. When finances dwindled, Miller would return to modelling, sitting for photographer George Hoyningen-Huene.

Lee’s talent as a photographer was in evidence early on, and she soon outgrew her role as assistant. Despite the fact that Ray was 17 years her senior, their artistic partnership was entirely reciprocal. “We were almost the same person when we were working,” she said. This partnership reached its peak in 1930 with their accidental discovery of solarisation, a technique which lent a photograph a silvery aura. Solarisation became the discovery of the age, catapulting photography from craft to fine art.

Such a close working style was bound to cause problems, and by 1931, the cracks were beginning to show. Lee was tiring of her subordinate role. As her reputation blossomed, she increasingly asserted her independence. Ray was torn between helping to build her career, and trying to keep her for himself.

“You must arrange to live as my wife, married or not,” Ray wrote to her. “I cannot see you in any other way. I am going through too much trouble for the amount of dissipation of forces that goes on, and one of these days I shall simply break down. This is the last time I shall retire at your request. Love Man.” The Surrealists were a bohemian group and demanded L’Amour fou “free love” – but while all agreed that jealousy should be banished, different standards applied to women. Lee’s friendship with Cocteau, during the filming of The Blood of a Poet drove Man to distraction, and when she entertained the advances of Russian socialite Zizi Svirsky he was beside himself.

The tempestuous climate worsened one night when Miller fished a discarded negative from the bin in Ray’s studio and set about cropping it into something of her own. In the rage that followed he threw her out. When she returned days later she found a copy of the photograph nailed to the wall. He had slashed the image of her neck with a razor and covered it in red ink. She responded by buying a one-way ticket to New York. When he realised what he’d done, Ray bought a pistol and told all and sundry that he could not decide if he should shoot Lee or himself.

The pistol appears in his hand in a self-portrait with a rope around his neck, a bottle of poison beside him, staged in the early hours of the morning, following a night spent howling in the rain under the window of Lee’s studio.

In the months that followed the split, Ray produced two of his most famous works. First he stuck a photograph of Miller’s eye to the pendulum of a metronome, and sent a picture of it to the Surrealist journal, with the instruction: “Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.”

Observatory Time − the Lovers, a canvas of Miller’s red lips suspended in the sky over Paris, had its own accompanying poem: “I meet you in the even light and empty space, and, my only reality, kiss you”. Later, he backtracked and photographed the painting hanging above a sofa where a plaster female figure lies decapitated. It took five years for the two to be able to bury the hatchet. They met again in 1937, at a Surrealists’ party, rekindling their former love as a profound friendship that lasted until his death in 1976.

“Our home was full of Man Ray’s work,” says Miller’s son, Antony Penrose. As a boy the true nature of the relationship was kept from him. But in 1977, shortly after his mother’s death, Penrose came across Man’s portraits of her in the attic. “This made me re-evaluate everything,” he says. “I’d just known her as a useless drunk, and suddenly I became very hungry to find more. And I thought, this isn’t art history, it’s a love story.” One of the most touching gifts Penrose found was a wooden Cuban cigar box with a fish-eye lens from a door peephole drilled through. Ray knew that she suffered terribly from depression – thanks to her later career as a war correspondent for Vogue – and he hoped the box might give her a different perspective.

The last time they met was in 1974, on the occasion of Ray’s retrospective at the ICA in London, when he was 85 years old. She procured him a wheelchair, which he promptly crawled out of, and into a large tube installation in one of the galleries. Miller crawled in the other end, and they met in the middle, backing out laughing. Each day he was in London, she visited him at his hotel. “They sat side by side on the bed,” his assistant later recalled. “There was a great tenderness between them. She seemed like his wife.”

When Penrose did find out about the intimacy his mother shared with Man, and the anguish they suffered at each other’s hands, how did he feel? “I found it inspirational,” he says. “It’s been a huge influence on my life, that such terrible conflict could resolve itself and leave such a deep, lasting affection.”